CHAPTER SIX 

Exactly one month after O.J. was found not guilty, Kris gave birth to a baby girl. Her first three girls had K names, and Bruce had agreed to continue the tradition. Eventually, with the help of her godmother, Kathie Lee Gifford, and after tossing out many options, they settled on Kendall. Kris already knew what her middle name would be. It seemed like a fitting tribute. Kendall Nicole Jenner was born on November 3, 1995.

With the trial finally over, Kris could return to devoting herself full-time to Bruce’s career. It was once again thriving. Corporate endorsements and speaking engagements were paying handsomely. The couple were now regularly starring together in infomercials for a whole series of fitness equipment including the SuperStep, PowerTrainer, and other health products.

Bruce had finally returned to the pinnacle he had once occupied but had long since abandoned through a series of bad decisions and poor management. He fully credited Kris’s business acumen for the turnaround.

“The reason today I am working as hard as I am is Kris,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I got rid of all agents, all managers, all the outsiders who prey on you. She knows how to keep all the percentages everyone else is always taking from you, until there’s nothing left for ol’ Bruce. She remade me from head to toe.”

As part of the concerted effort to rebrand Jenner and revive his career, both Kris and Bruce frequently gave interviews about their idyllic relationship. When the Los Angeles Times asked Bruce about his previous marriages, he was dismissive.

“I’ve had one marriage, and that was six years ago,” he responded. “The other ones? Contracts. That’s all they were. Contracts. Not good experiences. I’ve had one marriage and I’m married to her right now.”

But while they publicly professed that they had each finally found their soul mates, it seemed that Kris’s self-professed weaknesses may have still been playing a role in her life. Her former lover Todd Waterman would claim that he and Kris were still carrying on even after she took up with Bruce.

A friend confirmed the affair to In Touch Weekly. “He was always around, and Bruce was completely in the dark. He was the Camilla in the Charles-Diana relationship.”

Whether or not their marriage was the perfect match that the couple portrayed publicly in those days, there is no question that it was a financial success. They could finally afford to move out of the house they had been leasing since the divorce and get a place of their own. They settled on a beautiful gated community in the San Fernando Valley about fifteen miles from downtown LA called Hidden Hills, ranked as the twenty-seventh-wealthiest community in the United States and home to numerous celebrities, including Melissa Etheridge and Ozzy Osbourne. Kris’s friend Lisa Miles had moved there from Beverly Hills and had gushed about it. When Kris visited for the first time and saw its wide-open spaces and lush gardens, she was sold.

“It was heaven,” she recalled. In June 2006, they finally settled on a massive four-thousand-square-foot property that Kris termed “the monstrosity” because of its sheer size. Its $2.8 million selling price illustrated just how far Bruce’s career had progressed since marrying Kris. Only a few short years earlier, he could barely afford his rented one-bedroom house. Now the couple were living in the lap of luxury. Soon the family was ensconced in their new crib.

At first, the Kardashian kids would spend alternating weekends with Bob but remained at Hidden Hills during the week, commuting to the various private schools that Bob had agreed to pay for as part of the divorce settlement. The girls attended the exclusive Catholic all-girls high school Marymount, even though they were still practicing Protestants. The school provided a solid education, but it also plunged the kids into a world of immense privilege, where their classmates hailed from the upper echelons of Southern California society, the children of celebrities and studio executives.

Inevitably, attending school with the rich and famous meant that it was important to stay on top of the latest trends and accumulate the best of everything. After they rose to reality-TV fame, the children’s nanny, Pam Behan, reflected that she found the title of their famous show ironic, because from what she saw, the family was always trying to “keep up with the Joneses.” Behan credited their mother with encouraging the obsession with material possessions that would one day be on full display for the world to see.

“I believe she was grooming her children for their current celebrity status their entire lives. They only wore the cutest clothes from the nicest stores, and were always perfectly well dressed. Even at a young age, they were fashion plates, and their image was being carefully crafted. I do believe that the success they enjoy now is what she always hoped for and wanted for them and for herself.”

Behan claims that the kids in her charge were sweet but undeniably spoiled. In Kardashian Konfidential, the girls admit that they were indeed spoiled but stress that they weren’t “spoiled brats.” They explain that although most of the girls in their school had credit cards, Bob wouldn’t let them have their own. He would allow them to use his for basics, but not for luxuries such as Gucci bags. Each of the girls did get a car in high school, but in exchange for the automobile, Bob forced each child to sign a contract. They even include a photocopy of Kim’s contract to illustrate the point. Among its provisions:

• Part of Kimberly’s duties and responsibilities are to drive her sister, Khloé, and her brother, Robert, to their respective weekly activities. In addition, Kimberly shall run various errands for her father and help out whenever necessary. In the event Kimberly refuses or fails to drive her brother and sister to their respective activities or Kimberly refuses or fails to assist her wonderful father in any way, Kimberly’s automobile shall be taken away for the upcoming weekend.

• Kimberly agrees that in the very unlikely event that she takes drugs of any kind, smokes cigarettes or marijuana and or drinks alcohol excessively, then her car will be taken away for a period of six (6) months. This provision is irrevocable and cannot be modified by either parent. It is absolute.

Contracts like this were one of the effects of having a lawyer for a father, and Bob frequently used similar documents to provide carrots and sticks to hold his kids accountable, at least when they were staying with him. Kim claims that shortly after she got her first car, a BMW, she rear-ended another car when she bent down to pick something up off the floor in bumper-to-bumper traffic. As a result, Bob made her pay for the repairs herself, which forced her to take her first job, at a clothing store in Encino.

The girls claim that as a result of their father’s strict rules and determination to keep his children grounded, they were much less materialistic than their privileged friends. But just because they weren’t handed everything on a silver platter doesn’t mean they didn’t want the same things that their friends took for granted. Bob’s edict may indeed have had unintended consequences. In the spring of 1999, Bob had started to date a woman named Jan Ashley, whose late husband was the actor and producer John Ashley, who had appeared in a number of TV series, including a semiregular role on The Beverly Hillbillies as one of Ellie May Clampett’s suitors. Bob was renting a house across the street from Jan when their relationship began. Seven months later, on Thanksgiving Day, they were married.

The honeymoon took place in Vail, Colorado, and Bob was anxious for his kids to bond with his new wife, so they came along for a ski vacation. Thirty days later, Jan mysteriously asked for an annulment and the marriage was over almost as soon as it had begun. Neither Bob nor Jan ever explained what went wrong, until in 2014 Ashley blamed the Kardashian kids for their marital troubles.

“Did the kids have anything to do with it? Of course they did!” she revealed. “All I know is he was upset all the time. Not with me, [but] with his kids and his ex-wife. They were after him for money, money, money. I don’t think he could handle them. Money was an issue with them, as the Kardashians weren’t well off at the time, although they like to portray themselves as rich. From their daddy, they wanted everything right then. He didn’t have any money. He always pretended he had money. I’m the one who didn’t care about money.”

And although by this time Bob and Kris had apparently put their past troubles behind them and become friends, Ashley revealed that the pain of Kris’s adultery still lingered. “He talked about [her cheating] day in and day out,” Ashley said. “He talked about how she was guilty of everything. I asked him, ‘How is she guilty of everything?’ He said, ‘She’s guilty because she went out with all these guys and I didn’t know about it.’ ”

Ashley reserves her harshest criticisms for Kourtney and Khloé, but there were two kids whom she seems to have absolved from blame. She described both Kim and Rob as “sweet.”

Indeed, while her sisters constantly lamented the fact that they couldn’t afford to buy the same expensive fashions and accessories as their friends, Kim became extremely resourceful and creative about bringing in extra income. “I’m a shopahaolic,” she later confessed. In order to finance her expensive shopping habits, she started her own business, using eBay to buy and sell used items, including some of the expensive clothing that her parents had bought for her.

“I discovered Ebay and I loved shopping,” she later recalled. “I had to be on a budget. I didn’t have credit cards. How do I figure out how to make this a business? I remember I bought these Manolo Blahnik shoes that were $700. [Bob] let me buy five pairs. I had to pay him back with interest. I sold every pair on Ebay for $2500. I became so obsessed with seeing that return, I would sell off the things I wouldn’t be wearing.”

The eye-popping profit, she explained, stemmed from her early knack for spotting trends. The Manolos had been featured in one of Jennifer Lopez’s first videos, and women were clamoring for them. When she snapped up the last five pairs, she knew she could take advantage of the scarcity. From there, Kim conceived the idea of contacting the privileged friends she had grown up with in Beverly Hills and offering to clean out their closets, culling the clothes that they no longer wore, putting them up for sale on eBay, and sharing the profits. Her eBay account name was “kimsaprincess.”

The idea for the business came to her when she was visiting the home of her godfather, boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, and his wife, Bernadette, she told Player magazine in 2006. “Bernadette’s closet was massive and had so much stuff in it. I said to her, ‘You really need to clean out your closet.’ Well, we spent the whole night doing that.” The unwanted items soon landed on eBay, and Bernadette was so impressed that she began recommending Kim to friends such as Rob Lowe and Kenny G. She had soon earned the nickname Queen of the Closet Scene.

Meanwhile, Kim’s high school classmates had another description for the future reality-TV star. In her yearbook, she was described as “Most Likely to Meet Her Husband at the Million Man March” (the 1995 gathering called by Louis Farrakhan to promote black pride). The reference alluded to Kim’s known penchant, even then, for dating African Americans. When she was fourteen, in fact, Kim’s first serious boyfriend was Tito Jo Jackson, son of Michael’s brother Tito. Both Kim and Kourtney had attended preschool with a number of Michael’s nephews. Kim’s fourteenth birthday party was even held at Michael’s Neverland Ranch, an occasion that she would remember as magical.

“That was the most magical place on earth,” she told People. “When you drove up, there were baby elephants and chimpanzees in overalls, and there was all the rides. It was everything you can possibly imagine. The memories I have from that place will last for the rest of my life.” She also still has pleasant memories of the Jacksons. “They were the nicest family I’ve ever met. Michael definitely was never this disreputable person.”

T.J.—who Kim later revealed took her virginity—was the first in a long line of black boyfriends. Years later, she recalled that when she started going out with him, her dad “explained to me that he’s had a lot of interracial friends, and it might not be the easiest relationship. He said I should prepare myself for people to say things to me. When I was growing up, when I was in high school, I’d get magazines and see interracial couples and think, ‘They are so cute.’ I’ve always been attracted to a certain kind of look.”

Kris adored T.J. and claimed that she was heartbroken when the couple eventually broke up. While the other kids were still spending most of their time with Kris and Bruce as per the custody agreement, Kourtney, the oldest, had asked to live with her father. Although there were reports that she and Kris were constantly at each other’s throats, she later explained that life with eight kids at her mom’s was just too chaotic. Kim would also later choose to move in with Bob during her senior year of high school. “At my dad’s,” Kourtney recalled, “it was calm and he was easygoing.”

In contrast, life in the Jenner household was anything but calm, especially after Kris gave birth to yet another child, Kylie Kristen Jenner, on August 10, 1997.

“Every day’s a decathlon at our house,” Kris told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. “We have 10 different activities going at once. With kids ranging from a 17-year-old teenager to a 7-month-old infant, life can be crazy. My friends ask what I’m doing and I say, ‘I’m waxing one and diapering the other.’ ”

For the most part, Kourtney and Kim were self-described good girls, rarely getting into trouble. One notable exception occurred on an American Airlines flight to Atlanta in the summer of 1996, when the older girls were scheduled to meet up with Kris and Bruce, who was working as a commentator for the Games. On July 27, a bomb went off in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, killing one person and injuring 111 others. Days later, Kris made the arrangements for the girls to join the rest of the family, but they were reportedly traumatized by TV coverage of the bombing and were convinced that they would be bomb victims if they attended. Kris would not take no for an answer and insisted the girls come anyway.

Traveling as unaccompanied minors, the girls took their seats on the plane, but before the flight could take off they became fixated on another passenger. “That guy has a bomb!” they shouted. “We want to get off the plane.” Whether they were genuinely scared or whether it was simply a teenage prank has never been determined, but the plane was returned to the gate and the girls escorted off. They were suspended from flying for just one day. Only their stepfather’s celebrity status likely prevented a far worse consequence for an act that is considered a serious offense. Kris appeared to allude to her own skepticism about whether her daughters were genuinely frightened when she wrote, “In hindsight I guess it should have been foreshadowing to me about the kind of shenanigans Kourtney and Kimberly would get into later.”

Shortly after Kim turned nineteen in 1999, she announced to her family that she wanted to move out into her own apartment. Kourtney had been the first sibling to break off from the tight-knit family when she moved to Dallas to attend Southern Methodist University following her graduation from Marymount. After her older sister left for college, Kim claims she was devastated. The two had done everything together. Now she felt she was on her own. “I was nervous for her, and we would talk every day,” she later recalled. “It was a good experience for her and I’m glad she went but it was just weird for her to be away. She made me move in full time with my Dad so he wouldn’t be alone. When Kourtney and I were apart for that time, it was probably my first push towards independence.”

Now after living with her father for a year, Kim wanted to exert her independence even more, or so she professed to Kris. She had been dating a twenty-nine-year-old record producer named Damon Thomas, whom she had met while freelancing as a wardrobe stylist on a music-video shoot for one of Thomas’s acts. When Kim reported that she was planning to move to Northridge—even farther north of central LA than Hidden Hills—Kris’s suspicions were piqued. It made no sense, especially given the distance to the high-end clothing store where Kim was working in Encino. When she suddenly sported a new car and flashy new clothes, with no explanation of where they had come from, the entire family became curious.

On a whim, Kourtney decided to type her sister’s name into a search engine. Try that today and it would yield millions of hits. But at the time, it yielded only one—the record of Kim’s marriage to Thomas three months earlier. The couple had secretly married in Las Vegas after Kim told her family that they were going there only for a birthday celebration for Justin Timberlake, whom Thomas had been working with at the time. The family was flabbergasted. “I wanted to kill her,” Kris later confessed, “but Kim was now old enough to make her own decisions.”

“He was like, ‘Let’s go get married,’ ” Kim later recalled, “and I said, ‘Ok.’ I’m a people pleaser and I kind of wanted to please. I didn’t really think it out. I definitely planned on telling my family and my sisters that I had gotten married. I was just young and I didn’t know what I was doing.” Kris gave Kim twenty-four hours to tell Bob what she had done.

Kourtney said that he wasn’t at all pleased with the news and gave his daughter the cold shoulder for days. “My dad kind of had a rule,” Kim recalled. “If you got too serious with a boyfriend or if you moved in or if you did anything he didn’t approve of, you got cut off financially.”

Meanwhile, Kris had plenty to worry about on the home front with her youngest Kardashian daughter. While Kourtney and Kim were self-described “teen queens,” their sister Khloé recalls that they were “not an easy act to follow.” While the older girls were cruising through high school as part of the “in” crowd, Khloé was having problems navigating her own teen years. “It was not easy being a Kardashian sister at that time,” she would later admit. Part of the difficulty stemmed from the fact that she looked different from her sisters and was very self-conscious about her appearance.

After the divorce and the O.J. trial, Khloé revealed, people constantly gave the younger kids food. As a result, she recalls, she and Rob grew to be “fat little kids.” It didn’t help that she did not resemble her older sisters to begin with. While attending the same school as Kim and Kourtney, nobody believed she was a Kardashian. “You look nothing like them,” she was constantly reminded. Eventually, she became so stressed out about her appearance that she lost a massive amount of weight. It wasn’t an eating disorder, she insists. Rather, she started an extreme exercise regimen that included Tae Bo and horseback riding. She went from a size 10 or 12 to a size 0, she recalls. She describes all the symptoms of a classic eating disorder, though she claims she was determined not to let herself succumb to such a fate, especially after she saw an anorexic teenage girl at her grandparents’ Palm Springs housing complex who looked “unattractive and sad, sickly even.” Khloé’s parents, she recalls, didn’t think there was anything amiss about her rapid weight loss. They simply attributed her skeletal frame to the effects of puberty. But although the weight loss didn’t set off warning bells, they soon grew alarmed at other aspects of their youngest daughter’s behavior.

Although her sisters were known as the “good girls,” Khloé was by her own admission anything but. Her mother had taught her to drive when she was thirteen years old so that she could take her baby siblings to the hospital in case of an emergency. And although she never had to use her driving skills for that purpose, she frequently snuck out at night to visit the boyfriend that had set her on the wayward path, an older man who had taken her virginity when she was fourteen—an act that would have been prosecuted as statutory rape if her parents had known his true age.

Once she stole her mother’s car and it caught on fire. “I remember my friends and I saw this car and we were like, ‘Whoah, that person is screwed! And then I was like, ‘Shit that’s my car,’ ” she later told People.

Her grades had started to slip, and she was acting up at home. She also started shoplifting and club hopping, though Khloé later insisted that alcohol and drugs were not among her teenage vices. It was in fact Paris Hilton, she recalls, who helped her slip into her first LA club, by putting a red wig on her, having her hold an unlit cigarette, and telling her to claim she was a Playboy centerfold.

She later revealed that she had spent a considerable portion of her teenage years hanging out at the house of a celebrity whose name she refused to mention.

They were involved in stuff that “I shouldn’t have been around,” she recalled, describing something “really horrible” that happened to her, during which she could have been seriously hurt and barely got out alive. A week after the incident, she remembers getting a call from a friend of the “sicko freak” who purportedly wanted to apologize for his actions.

On her way to meet him, she was involved in a serious car accident that sent her head first through the windshield of her Mercedes. Emergency crews had to saw through the car to extract her. Taken to the hospital with a concussion and lacerations, she was released soon afterward but forced to stay in bed recovering for a number of weeks. Khloé claims that she still suffers memory loss as the result of the accident.

When she finally called it quits with the older boyfriend and resolved to set her life back on course, she knew it wasn’t going to happen by returning to the high school where she had been made miserable for years in the shadow of her popular older sisters. “She absolutely hated school,” recalled her nanny, Pam Behan. “Every single morning, she had a new and different excuse for why she couldn’t make it to class. ‘Pam, I have a headache. I can’t go to school,’ she told me one morning. ‘Okay, I’ll get you some Tylenol and a glass of water,’ I said. ‘Please get dressed, Khloé, and come and eat breakfast.’ The next day it was something different. ‘I have a horrible stomachache,’ she moaned, as if she were about to die. ‘I’m so sick, I can’t make it to school.’ ”

Finally her parents thought it best that Khloé drop out of Marymount—where she had fallen severely behind academically—and continue her high school studies in a homeschooling program run through Alexandria Academy. Kris, however, wasn’t the type of mom to sit down at the dining-room table and teach her daughter math. Nor did she have the time, what with her own hectic schedule. The program allowed students to work at their own pace instead of in a structured school environment. To help Khloé catch up, Robert hired tutors to work with her in an intensive course of study that enabled her to complete the equivalent of three years of high school in one year. She even graduated with honors, with a 3.8 GPA.

Although the kids at various times clashed with Kris to the point of enmity, they adored their father and rarely fought with him, despite his strict adherence to rules and strong moral code. So when he informed them in the summer of 2003 that he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, the news was devastating. At the time, Kris was dealing with her own stepfather’s cancer diagnosis. She had put aside most of her business ventures to be with her mother in La Jolla and help her run the store while Mary Jo cared for Harry.

When Bob told her that he too had been diagnosed with cancer, the first thing she did was sit down and write him a long letter informing him of her regret at having hurt him all those years before. “I have so many wonderful memories,” she wrote, “and I am grateful to you for being such an incredible man. . . . I very foolishly threw all that away and for that I will always be sorry. I was a very stupid and foolish girl. . . . I hope you will one day understand it really had NOTHING to do with you but obviously something went terribly wrong.”

For the kids, the news was even more emotional, though Bob had hidden the severity of his diagnosis from them: The cancer was already at stage 4 and the chances of recovery virtually nil. “I think my dad was in denial or just trying to hide it from us,” Kim would later recall. To break the news, he summoned the girls to his house for a family meeting, though he failed to tell them that the diagnosis was terminal. Rob was living with him at the time and had already heard the news.

About two weeks after his diagnosis, and before the worst of his symptoms started to manifest, Bob had married a real-estate agent he had been dating named Ellen Pierson. The timing may have appeared odd but, according to Ellen, the couple had been dating for five years and he had proposed all the way back in 2001. “We planned a wedding,” she told In Touch. “We didn’t just run out and get married. In fact I met with the girls just the week before to go over all our plans. We had a beautiful wedding with the girls and all his family at our home.”

Bob went downhill fast. Only eight weeks after he was diagnosed, he passed away. Just before he died, Kourtney, Khloé, and Kim were called to Bob’s house to say their final good-byes. They remembered that he asked if they could fetch the toy monkey, Jocko, that he had kept since his childhood, and which was in his bedroom closet.

His passing on September 30, 2003, at the age of fifty-nine hit the whole family hard. But by far the most devastated was nineteen-year-old Khloé, who recalled crying hysterically whenever anybody mentioned her father. “I disappeared from my family,” she said. “I didn’t understand why God would let it happen.”

She remembers months of night terrors, an ulcer, and severe stress that caused all her hair to fall out. It would be a full two years before it grew back, during which she wore a wig to cover her matted scalp. “I was kind of in denial,” she later told E!. “I had said my good-byes but not really like I should have.”

Worse still, she engaged in what she would later describe as self-destructive behavior. “I got crazy with alcohol,” she recalls, “and became very self-destructive and aggressive too. I was always in a club and the night would end with me angry and crying and screaming. I was mean and unhappy.”

When she was packing up her belongings from her old room after the funeral, she remembers asking Ellen whether she could have Jocko. When her father’s widow refused the request, she confesses to running to the closet and stealing the monkey, along with a pair of her father’s old boots. Kim revealed that during her last conversation with her father, he told her he knew she would be okay, but he asked her to take care of the little ones. “He was really concerned about my brother, what he would do,” she said.

For a decade after Bob’s death, there was no record of animosity between his kids and Ellen Kardashian. That changed in 2013, when she sold her ex-husband’s handwritten journals to In Touch—including entries that contained some extremely unflattering comments about Kris Jenner. The worst included numerous allegations that she had abused and neglected her children—most written during the period of the couple’s bitter divorce. In one particularly unflattering entry, for example, Bob describes Kris’s locking herself away in her bedroom for days at a time to sleep because of all the partying she was doing. Another entry accuses her of repeatedly forgetting to pick up her kids at school because she was too busy cavorting with her lover Todd Waterman.

In various sections of the diaries, Bob predicts what would become of each of his children. He claims that Kourtney would end up resenting Kris, whereas Kim would “become her mother,” drawn to successful men who reflect glamor. Khloé would “do whatever she wants, when she wants.” He was the most worried about Rob, who, he fretted, was “very confused.”

Upon the release of the diaries at the height of the Kardashians’ reality-show fame, the girls immediately hit back at Ellen. “How can such a piece of trash even mention my father’s name?” Tweeted Khloé. “You married him on his death bed while he was not even aware of his surroundings. You should be hiding in shame for all the lies you sell to tabloids.”

In April 2013, the family filed a federal lawsuit against Ellen for copyright infringement—changing their story from the original claim that the diaries were forged to the charge that they are copyrighted material that belonged to the children. “The defendant,” states the claim, “is engaged in a despicable and unlawful scheme to hold in secret and convert and now exploit the material.”

Ellen defended her right to release the journals and vouched for their authenticity. “These are authentic handwritten journals I have shared, that my late husband Robert Kardashian so carefully wrote during 1989 and 1990 at a most trying and touching time in his life. They are my personal possession and he left them to me on his passing.”

The feud exploded into full public view after members of the family took a shot at Ellen on their reality show, describing her as a “slippery snake” who was telling lies and spreading rumors about the family. The family claimed that they had hired a private investigator, who determined that Ellen had filed for bankruptcy twice. On air, they decide to pursue legal action against Ellen.

“I’m not really surprised when I hear this woman has filed bankruptcy a couple times. I mean it’s obvious motivation for her to want to sell stories. We’re definitely going to do something to stop it and that’s that,” Kim says on the show. The family is seen meeting with an attorney to plan how to deal with Ellen’s “lies.”

When Khloé says that Ellen “married my father on his deathbed,” Kris responds, “She propped [Robert] up on a pillow, basically in his own bed and married him in his pajamas.” Kourtney corrects her: “Mom, he wasn’t on the bed, he was on the couch,” to which Kris says, “Well, propped him up on the couch and married him.”

“These statements are false and imply that Robert was an invalid and physically and mentally incapacitated at the time of his marriage,” Ellen’s court filing reads. “The truth is the couple was married at their home in Encino on a hot summer day, July 27, 2003, where Robert wore a ‘Tommy Bahama’ style shirt (not his pajamas) and Ellen wore a sundress.”

Ellen charged that the episode had been crafted to contain the damage caused by the release of the diaries and the toll that they were starting to take on Kris Jenner’s image.

“The Kardashians developed and deployed a ‘spin’ designed to neutralize the exceptionally negative opinion that Robert had of Kris Jenner,” Ellen charged in a defamation suit that she brought against the family and the two production companies that produce the show. “The Kardashians’ strategy was to neutralize the unrefuted details in Robert’s diaries and notes by suggesting that they were in fact fabricated by Ellen. The Kardashians’ strategy was to create a fake scenario where Robert’s story and words would become the narrative of this surviving widow which the Kardashians would then claim was motivated not by truth but by greed.”

The suit goes on to allege that the “shameful rewriting of history” was taken at the behest of Kris and “motivated by profit.” Ellen describes it as an insult to the legacy of Robert Kardashian.

In Kardashian Konfidential, the three daughters detail the agony of their father’s final weeks and the time they spent comforting him after his cancer diagnosis. They describe Kourtney’s spending many evenings watching old black-and-white movies with him, including The Postman Always Rings Twice, during his final days. They describe how he threw up profusely and how he wanted to eat only Cream of Wheat, which Kim frequently made for him. But in her counterclaim, Ellen provides her own version of his final days and the presence of his family.

“When he passed away his children were not there,” she states.

My daughter was there and three friends of ours. [Bob’s children] were there early in the morning. I don’t know why they didn’t come back. They knew that it would be soon, and they knew it would be that evening. I think it was very difficult for them as it was for everyone. They came at different times. From time to time they would come together. . . . The girls would stop in when they wanted to. I really think that it was very important for him to have his family. He was very family oriented. That was his life, with his children. So yes, I know that he was very sad about that. . . . Robert would have been very sad had he known that his children were not there by his bedside. At the moment Robert took his last breath, none of his children could be bothered to be by his side, opting instead to attend a party at Kourtney’s home.

In her deposition for the case, however, Kim had her own version.

She changed the locks on the doors when my dad was sick and told us to not come visit our dad, not come see him. We let that go for a few days then finally we’re like, “That’s our dad, he is dying, we will come over there.” And we called him and we said, “Dad, open the door. We know she’s gone.” She was at, like, a salon appointment. We came back to the house and we got in there and we took a key. And we had to, like, force our way in the house. So decisions to keep family out, even his friends all came with us and we’re like we’re all going to go there and barge in and make this woman let us see our father.

Kim also described the marriage ceremony itself, claiming that her father was barely coherent that day and was so ill that he couldn’t stand. “Based on my observations and interactions with my father,” she stated, “I believe that he was suffering from extreme mental and physical fatigue and that he was not fully aware of his surroundings that day [the wedding]. Based on my knowledge of my father over my lifetime, it was apparent to me that his mental state was compromised and I believed it was due to his illness and medications. My father had to be sat on his couch until the ceremony, which took place at the couch. For the Wedding Ceremony, my father had to be propped up, to a standing position in front of the couch, for the few minutes of the ceremony.”

Ellen takes issue with that charge as well. “At no time during the one-and-a-half year engagement, planning of the wedding or marriage did the Kardashian children object to their father’s decision to marry Ellen, even with the knowledge that Robert’s medical diagnosis was fatal,” her counterclaim stated.

In another episode of their reality show, Kim is seen telling Kourtney and Khloé, “Dad’s ex says that Mom used to beat me and hit me and kick me and, like, she claims Dad told her.” But Ellen was quick to respond: “This statement is false because Ellen did not ever make these claims. These claims were published from a diary and letters written by Robert Kardashian and the Kardashians purposely and falsely attributed the statements to Ellen.”

In April 2014, the family and Ellen reached an out-of-court settlement in the case. Four months later, the Los Angeles Superior Court dismissed the majority of Ellen’s defamation claims against the Kardashians and the two production houses also named in the suit. The court awarded $84,000 to the defendants as compensation for attorneys’ fees and other legal expenses.

The legal drama over the diaries, however, wasn’t the only time Ellen had clashed with the family. In 2012, Ellen revealed that Kourtney had attempted to challenge the provisions in Robert’s will that left most of his possessions to his widow.

“According to the calls I received from the attorney,” she told a reporter, “Kourtney felt like she wanted to have her father’s handwriting analyzed to make sure that he actually had written those things down that he left me. And she did. Kourtney actually had his handwriting analyzed. But every time she called the attorney about something, he would call me to let me know. It was never-ending. There were many things, many things about the will.”

At the center of their 2003 dispute, Ellen said, was a Mercedes-Benz vehicle.

“The biggest thing she contested was the car,” she recalled. “I finally put an end to the problem after six months with the Mercedes and I sold it. I bought myself another car so that I wouldn’t have to hear her call and scream and yell at me every single day about that, about wanting her father’s car. It was never-ending.”

Kourtney had also demanded an item that Robert kept at his Palm Springs vacation home. “Kourtney wanted the desk that was in the desert that was her father’s,” Ellen said.

There was always a reason why she wanted something, and that was because she said she put her initials in it when she was a little girl. I felt badly, and I had the movers come ship it to her. There were some pieces that her father had brought out of art work she wanted and had reasons why she wanted them. I packaged up as much as I could, and I sent it back. But every time I gave her something, she wanted something else. She also accused me of taking something that I had no clue of and had never seen. When I would give her something, she would call me back the next day and want something more. Then I would get lists in the mail. I would get a call from the attorney saying she’s back here (at the house). She contested everything that was given to me personally.

It is likely futile to attempt to figure out the truth behind the she-said/she-said claims of the Kardashian family feud. We’ll likely never know what really went down during Robert’s final weeks. But the rare peek at the human drama behind the legal wrangling illustrates two things. The face the Kardashian clan shows the public is rarely what it seems. Anyone who crosses the family and its powerful matriarch quickly discovers that they have a powerful vehicle for damage control at their disposal, and they aren’t afraid to use it.

These would be recurring themes in the saga of the Kardashians.

During the final months of her stepfather’s life, Kris virtually ran every facet of her mother’s La Jolla children’s boutique, Shannon & Co., while Mary Jo tended to her dying husband. The experience was so exhilarating, Kris later recalled, that she decided to start a children’s clothing store of her own.

After two years at Southern Methodist University, Kourtney had switched to the University of Arizona, where she studied fashion. Kim was already married and doing her own thing, while Khloé was still a basket case, recovering from her father’s death. So Kris asked her oldest daughter if she would like to partner in a store similar to the one in La Jolla, where Kourtney often helped out on weekends.

Soon Kris was scouting locations and Kourtney was putting her fashion expertise to good use, selecting the merchandise lines that they would introduce in a fashionable little Calabasas storefront, not far from the Jenner home. They called it Smooch, and it soon became apparent that mother and daughter had a flair for business. Their friends and neighbors flocked to the new store to deck out their children in the tasteful high-end outfits that would soon become de rigueur in Hidden Hills. “This was our way of plugging through that horrible time [after Bob died] and just plugging ahead,” Kris explained.

“I threw myself into the store,” Kourtney later wrote. “I came early and left two hours after closing every day. It became my baby and my obsession and I really put my emotion and my time into it.” For Kris, its success would be one more stepping stone to a future business empire. For Kourtney, it would lay the path for a retail empire of her own. Meanwhile, Kim’s closet/eBay venture was thriving. The same couldn’t be said for her marriage.

When Damon Thomas filed for divorce from her in 2003, it soon became clear that the marriage had been a disaster from the start—hardly a surprise, considering that Kim had run off as a nineteen-year-old and married a high-flying music mogul ten years her senior. Again, however, the picture of what happened in the marriage and what went wrong depended on who you believed. According to Kim’s statement as the respondent in the divorce papers, she was subjected to repeated domestic abuse. Thomas, she claimed, hit her for the first time just a few months after they were married.

“One incident,” she wrote, “occurred on the day that Damon and I were going skydiving with Justin Timberlake. Before we left home, Damon hit me in the face and cut my lip open. I fell into the bed frame and banged my knee hard.” On another occasion, she claims, Thomas learned she had paged someone, which led to yet another violent incident: “He became enraged and punched me in the face. My face was bruised and swollen as a result. I thought about calling the police but was afraid and decided not to do so.” In a third example of domestic violence, she writes, “[Thomas] came at me and slammed me against the closet wall. . . . He held me up against the wall with his hands around my neck and threatened to choke me. He then took one hand and punched the wall right next to my head.”

Besides physical violence, Kim also details a number of incidents of psychological abuse. Although she had a job at a high-end boutique when they first met, Thomas insisted that she quit, because he didn’t want her coming into contact with any of her old boyfriends, who would know to find her at the store if they wanted to see her. Thomas “wanted to know where I was at all times,” she stated. “He often arrived home at 4:30AM and expected me to prepare a meal for him at that hour.” Kim was also forced to “ask permission” to go out to dinner with friends or even to go shopping.

“He didn’t want me to go to the mall or with friends,” she stated. “He told me he didn’t want men to have the opportunity to ‘hit on’ me. Damon decided what we would do and when we would do it. He was very much the ‘King of the castle.’ ”

She also claimed that her husband gave her thousands of dollars and demanded she get liposuction and that Thomas assaulted her when she returned home during the divorce to retrieve personal items from the bathroom.

In addition, Kim said, Thomas would start arguments at family gatherings and tried to convince her that her mother and sisters were “evil.” To brand her siblings as “whores,” Kim alleged, Thomas once showed nude photos of one of her sisters to Robert Kardashian. Thomas told a different story about the demise of the couple’s three-year marriage.

“She can’t write or sing or dance, so she does harmful things in order to validate herself in the media,” he told In Touch magazine. “That’s a fame-whore to me. It’s just not cool at all.” He also claimed that Kim is not the supportive sister she portrays in public, who would do anything for her family.

“Kim is obsessed with fame,” he told the magazine, and would step on anybody, including her sisters Kourtney and Khloé, to get ahead. “She’s jealous and competitive with her sisters. Jealousy is a big thing with her.” He believed that Kim leaked excerpts from their divorce documents, especially the claim that he beat her, which he vociferously denied. “It’s just absolutely not true,” he said, pointing out that Kim never filed for a restraining order or a protective order; she accused him of these acts only to get “a lot of money” out of him. Indeed, Thomas added, he was the one who filed for divorce first, because Kim was cheating on him with “multiple guys.” He claimed that when they briefly reconciled, she convinced him to finance “extravagant shopping sprees” and a number of plastic-surgery procedures, including a boob job and liposuction. “She wanted to have that lifestyle,” he said. “She wanted to be what she ultimately became.” Damon said he had no problem financing this lifestyle, but the final straw came when he saw Kim with Jennifer Lopez’s ex, Cris Judd, on a magazine cover. “I saw my wife with another man, wearing the clothes that we had just bought after her lipo,” he said. “It was not something as a husband you ever wanted to see.”

The marriage was eventually dissolved in 2004, and Thomas was ordered to pay Kim $56,000.

By the time Kim separated from her husband, Smooch was starting to get off the ground, and Kim was feeling a little left out watching her older sister carve out a place for herself in the fashion world. But the little boutique was too small to add another sister to the operation. The girls started to talk about maybe opening up another store one day, run by all the Kardashian sisters. For now, however, Kim plunged right back into her closet-organizing and eBay service. When word got out that she was back in business, she once again had a full list of clients who wanted to declutter their wardrobes, including a number of celebrities.

One of those clients just happened to be an heiress with whom Kim had attended the prestigious Buckley preschool when she was four years old. When Paris Hilton contacted her old friend and told Kim that she needed to “restock” her closet, it was a fateful call.